Quotes from Rebecca Mead

The best education for a writer, I think, is to read a lot - college can be a good place to do that.

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.

there are pleasures to be had from books beyond being lightly entertained. There is the pleasure of being challenged; the pleasure of feeling one's range and capacities expanding; the pleasure of entering into an unfamiliar world, and being led into empathy with a consciousness very different from one's own; the pleasure of knowing what others have already thought it worth knowing, and entering a larger conversation. ( The New Yorker , 13 Aug 2014)

What's your favorite book?' is a question that is usually only asked by children and banking identity-verification services--and favorite isn't, anyway, the right word to describe the relationship a reader has with a particularly cherished book. Most serious readers can point to one book that has a place in their life like the one that 'Middlemarch' has in mine.

If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally," Eliot once wrote. "The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.

Books gave us a way to shape ourselves—to form our thoughts and to signal to each other who we were and who we wanted to be.

Being absolutely sure that one is right is part of growing up, and so is realizing, years later, that the truth might be more nuanced.

Middlemarch offers what George Eliot calls, in a wonderfully suggestive turn of phrase, "the home epic"- the momentous, ordinary journey traveled by most of us who have not even thought of aspiring to sainthood. The home epic has its own nostalgia - not for a country left behind but for a childhood landscape lost.

Eliot was scornful of idle women readers who imagined themselves the heroines of French novels, and of self-regarding folk who saw themselves in the most admirable character in a novel, and she hoped for more nuanced engagement from her own readers. Even so, all readers make books over in their own image, and according to their own experience.

meliorism"—the conviction that, through the small, beneficent actions and intentions of individuals, the world might gradually grow to be a better place.

I could understand the impulse to make the novel more accessible. I want as many people as possible to read The Mill on the Floss too. But like paperback editions of classic novels issued with updated covers resembling those of Twilight , it seemed a pandering and misbegotten effort, as if no young reader today might possibly pick up a novel written one hundred and fifty years ago unless the book were in sexy neo-Gothic drag.

Blaming the bride, while making for colorful feature stories and cruelly riveting television programming, wasn't an adequate explanation for what seemed to be underlying the concept of the Bridezilla: that weddings themselves were out of control, and that a sense of proportion had been lost, not just individually but in the culture at large.

A book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book.

In all my imaginings about what it would mean to have her in my life, I had forgotten to include the prospect of joy.

Reading is often thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself...

It is undeniable, that unions formed in the maturity of thought and feeling, and grounded only on inherent fitness and mutual attraction, tended to bring women into more intelligent sympathy with men,